It’s About Building Trusted Relationships

by Diane Krakora – CEO

At the recent Cloud Channel Summit event, Marc Sternberg, CEO Rising Tide Media, was bullish on the opportunities to partner with cloud services.  He commented that with cloud computing gaining broad based market acceptance and cloud solutions delivering tangible business benefits, cloud vendors need partners help.  Sternberg stressed success in the cloud is about building trusted relationships – between vendors, channels and customers.

The channel’s traditional role of addressing technical complexities might not be as important but vendors still need partners to extend their geographic reach and create industry specific solutions in the cloud ecosystem. With IaaS and PaaS, partners are critical to help customers overcome confusion and uncertainly, package raw capabilities into business quality solution and provider greater customer support and management capabilities.  Partners have several opportunities in cloud solutions, from consulting opportunities such as assessments, planning, design and development, developing industry specific solutions, and creating geography-specific relationships, to driving customer support, training and integrations.

Sternberg also highlighted that the partners’ biggest fears are cannibalization of their current business, confusing their customers, disrupting their business (cash flow) and growing channel conflict between direct and indirect channels. He encouraged the vendor in the room to actively address these fears through designing, implementing and clearly communicating a cloud services engagement model.

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